Advice about enjoying travel later in life tends to focus on logistics: pack light, build in rest days, buy the travel insurance. All useful, and none of it touches why travel feels so good to begin with, or whether that feeling is available at 72 the same way it was at 32. Recent psychological research answers both questions more directly than most travel advice bothers to.
The foundational work comes from a 2021 paper by Shigehiro Oishi and Erin Westgate, published in Psychological Review, which argues that a good life has been measured incompletely for decades. Psychologists have traditionally split well-being into two dimensions: a happy life, marked by pleasant feelings and comfort, and a meaningful life, marked by purpose and coherence. Oishi and Westgate proposed a third, largely overlooked dimension they call psychological richness, a life characterized by variety, novelty, and experiences that genuinely change how a person sees the world. Their research found that psychologically rich experiences don’t necessarily need to be pleasant or purposeful in the moment, a difficult, disorienting trip abroad can still register as psychologically rich, even if it wasn’t especially happy or obviously meaningful while it was happening. Travel, along with things like taking on a new challenge or immersing yourself in an unfamiliar culture, emerged in their research as one of the most consistent sources of this kind of richness, precisely because it reliably interrupts routine and forces a shift in perspective. One detail from earlier work in this research area is worth sitting with directly: studies examining who reports psychologically rich lives found no significant relationship between age and psychological richness. Novelty-seeking of this kind isn’t something the data shows fading out as a younger person’s habit.
A second, more targeted study adds direct evidence about older travelers specifically, rather than adults in general. A 2024 study by Shu Cole, Chenggang Hua, Siyun Peng, and Weixuan Wang, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, used nationally representative data from the Health and Retirement Study to examine how leisure travel patterns related to loneliness, depression, and cognitive function in older adults. After adjusting for age, income, wealth, education, and existing difficulty with daily activities, the researchers found that longer-distance travel was positively associated with higher cognitive function and with lower depressive symptoms and lower loneliness. Distance specifically was the variable that mattered in their analysis, not simply whether someone took a trip at all. A short visit nearby and a longer journey further from home didn’t register the same way in their data.
Put together, the two studies point in a complementary direction. Oishi and Westgate’s research explains why travel, particularly the kind that pushes a person somewhat outside familiar territory, taps into a distinct and durable source of well-being that isn’t about comfort or even happiness in the moment, and their data gives real reason to think that source doesn’t dry up with age. Cole and colleagues’ research adds a more concrete, age-specific data point: among actual older adults, going further, not just going somewhere, tracked with measurably better cognitive and emotional outcomes.
Neither study should be read as more definitive than it is. Cole and colleagues’ data is correlational, drawn from a survey rather than a controlled experiment, so it can’t fully rule out the reverse explanation, that people who are already less lonely, less depressed, and more cognitively sharp are simply the ones with the health and resources to travel further in the first place. Their sample was also limited to the specific measures collected in the Health and Retirement Study, a US-based survey, which may not generalize cleanly to other countries or travel styles. Psychological richness, as a construct, is also considerably newer than the traditional happiness and meaning framework, and it hasn’t accumulated the same decades of replication. Oishi and Westgate’s claim that richness doesn’t decline with age comes from studies not specifically designed around the practical realities of travel in one’s 70s, including the mobility and health considerations that can genuinely constrain how far someone can reasonably go.
Within those honest limits, the research points somewhere encouraging and fairly specific. The instinct to keep seeking out travel that unsettles a routine a little, rather than only travel built purely around comfort, isn’t a habit the data ties to youth. And for older travelers specifically, the evidence suggests that going a bit further, not just getting away, is the part worth prioritizing when it’s realistically possible to do.